How we used to sleep

This project seeks to raise public awareness of the importance of healthy sleeping habits for physical and mental wellbeing by creative recreation of early modern sleeping practices - a period that has been termed a 'golden age' of sleep quality. This ambition will be achieved through a year-long collaboration with the National Trust's Tudor house Little Moreton Hall, which recreates the routines of Tudor daily life for its users. Working with Little Moreton Hall's team (including Costumed Interpreters; educational team; gardening team; staff and volunteers) and with local artists, filmmakers, social enterprises, mental healthcare providers and service users, and school groups across the northwest, the project will deliver a programme of costumed re-enactments of bedtime habits and sleep-management techniques, talks, demonstrations, hands-on activities, workshops, videos, artworks, public events and educational materials at Little Moreton Hall and across the northwest based on early modern sleeping habits and their relationship to historic healthcare practices. The programme will encourage a wide range of public audiences to place greater value on the quality of their sleep, and educate them about how to optimise their sleep quality. This initiative responds to a clearly defined need to combat the sleep deprivation 'crisis' that is endemic to globalised 24/7 societies, which damages economic growth and results in long-term physical and mental health problems.

This project has emerged from five years of research visits and collaborative activities with the National Trust, whose collections have been pivotal to the PI's published work on sleep. Her book, 'Sleep in Early Modern England' (Yale University Press, 2016) is the first major historical study of sleeping practices. The book establishes the distinctiveness of early modern sleep culture and defines a critical relationship between sleep's cultural value and its quality. These key conclusions form the core of the creative activities proposed, which will establish the critical voice of historians in sleep's modern knowledge economy, alongside those working in the fields of medicine and biological sciences.

The sleep-themed programme of activities will represent a major innovation in interpretation approaches by the National Trust, whose future policies and working practices will directly benefit from the project. The project will build the capacity of staff and volunteers at Little Moreton Hall, and NT Tudor properties in the northwest (including Baddesley Clinton and Tudor Merchants House), by training them in a cutting edge aspect of social history, thereby enabling them to deliver innovative historically-informed events for their users, to expand and deepen the engagement of their existing audiences, and to increase the revenues of the heritage industry in a long-term perspective.

This partnership will build new connections between the academic community, the heritage and creative industries, mental healthcare providers and users, and the educational sector across the northwest, creating new avenues for dissemination and new opportunities to establish the role of the humanities in responding to socio-economic challenges.

The 'How we used to sleep' initiative calls for a recalibration of the balance between sleep's biological drivers, which lie at the heart of medical and scientific analyses, and its cultural and environmental dimensions. This project will demonstrate that the way people think about sleep, and how they manage it, have a critical effect on sleep quality. This core principle will be creatively communicated to a wide range of non-academic audiences, which include the heritage sector, mental healthcare providers and service users, school and community groups in the northwest region, and the general public.

The project's chief beneficiary is the National Trust's Little Moreton Hall, whose visitor base and socio-economic impact will be significantly extended. The creative programme of events will deepen users' emotional engagement with LMH by focusing on sleep: a universal aspect of human experience. LMH's profile within the NT organisation will also be enhanced as the project will be used as a case study to highlight the added value that cutting-edge historical research can bring to the heritage sector. LMH's team of staff and volunteers will also be trained in core aspects of sleep's history, building their capacity to enrich visitor enjoyment, expand their user communities, and to deliver sleep-themed activities beyond the project's lifespan.

The project will encourage public users of LMH, and the National Trust more broadly, to understand the role that healthy sleep plays in securing physical and mental health. Users will be introduced to historical strategies to manage their sleep on a daily basis and encouraged to incorporate them within their daily routines. In so doing, the project supports the work of professional healthcare providers, including the Department of Health and Public Health England, for whom preventative healthcare practices are a key priority. Mental healthcare providers and service users in Cheshire will benefit directly from the project's insights and creative approach through a carefully tailored programme of engagement activities.

This project will provide a unique case study of collaboration between the heritage industry and the academic community by placing historic sleeping practices at its centre. The project's results will be shared across the NT organisation as a model of good practice, thus contributing to policy in the heritage industry and establishing the critical role of historical research in facilitating heritage organisations to engage and expand their public audiences in creative new ways.

Additional beneficiaries of the project include the primary and secondary education sectors, whose curricula will be enriched by pioneering historical research. Local artists, social enterprises, and filmmakers will also play a key role in the design and delivery of project activities, which will enable them to expose them to new partners in the academic community and heritage industry.